“It takes an enormous amount of passion,” said Joyce Haver, a Phoenix businesswoman who was a Bush Pioneer in 2000 and a Ranger in 2004 and who said she was unlikely to plunge in again. “I probably don’t have the passion I had last time.”The Rangers and Pioneers make up a critical constituency: the big-money people who powered the Bush fund-raising machine.

Haver, who said she still believed that McCain would make a far better president than either of the Democratic candidates, said her lack of enthusiasm stemmed from a number of factors, including her frustration with politics in general and with McCain’s support for the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law that many conservatives revile, the International Herald Tribune reports.

When the daily ran a lengthy article last week on the five year memorial commemorating Lori Piestewa, it was clear this revival regarding the name of Phoenix’s popular mountain, would not be far behind. Piestewa died in 2003 while serving in the armed forces in Iraq.

The U.S. Board on Geographic Names now enters the picture with an April 10, 2008 vote which, if passed, would authorize the name be used on maps and other federal publication.

This interesting historical revisionism is included in today‘s front page article: Five years ago, Gov. Janet Napolitano and others successfully convinced a state panel to waive its own five-year waiting period to adopt the name Piestewa Peak.

Did we read that correctly?

That “convincing” was accomplished by the disreputable, ham-handed tactics of Gov. Janet Napolitano and her then henchman-in-chief, Mario Diaz. Diaz had served as her campaign manager and deputy chief of staff, and was no stranger to strong arm tactics. He attempted to pressure the chairman of state geographic names board to bypass the established five-year waiting period required when landmarks are posthumously named.

When brute force didn’t work, Diaz resorted to back-door intimidation tactics and coercement by buttonholing the man’s employer. Finally, the hapless chairman was removed from his leadership role and the name change was ramrodded through.

If this is “convincing,” dictionaries need to be revised.

Meanwhile, most of us continue to take our weekend hikes on Squaw Peak.

According to the Vatican, Islam has overtaken Roman Catholicism as the biggest single religious denomination in the world. Figures recently compiled in the Vatican’s newly-released 2008 yearbook of statistics, said Muslims made up 19.2 percent of the world’s population and Catholics 17.4 percent.

No word on whether or not the “Religion of Peace” was counting the 72 virgins each martyr of the faith receives for blowing up innocent people at weddings, schools, restaurants, on public buses and in shopping malls. Those inclusions could jack up the numbers considerably.